1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network printing systems, and in particular, to a method and apparatus for performing digital half-tone screen calibrations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Network printing systems generally comprise an assemblage of different printers, client computers, servers, and other components connected over a network. A print job is assembled at a client computer and transmitted over the network to a server linked to a variety of printers. Although these printers have historically been used to reproduce text, they are increasingly being used to reproduce graphic and image files, which have significant grayscale content.
Digital printers with grayscale reproduction capabilities use half tone screens with or without dot density control (contone) to reproduce the grayscales. Due to differences in dot gain characteristics, types of screens, and contone designs, grayscale characteristics can vary widely from printer to printer. Consequently, when graphic and image files generated for a particular grayscale characteristic are sent to a printer with a different characteristic, the appearance of the printed output may be substantially different. Such variations are more pronounced among bi-level printers, because dots are not as easily controlled as they are with contone printers.
These variations often result in visually unacceptable results, because proper rendering of grayscale information is critical to the reproduction of graphical and image files. This problem can be avoided by imposing a print job routing scheme that associates particular graphical and image files with a particular printer in the network, but that requires storage, enforcement, and management of these associations, and is antithetical to the flexible and distributed nature of a network computing system. Also, by confining the printing of a grayscale image to a particular printer, this approach would not allow an individual to adjust the image quality of a desired print on a local printer, before transferring the print file to a higher quality or higher capacity printer for the final product. There is therefore a need for a system that allows consistent grayscale printing among a variety of printers in a network, each with different grayscale printing characteristics.
Further, while this functionality could be implemented with the use of transfer functions, this method is computationally inefficient, particularly with printers or drivers with limited processing capability and/or memory. What is needed is a computationally efficient algorithm for directly implementing this functionality. The present invention satisfies that need.